Clinical laboratory work often involves a number of repetitive tasks that are required to be performed quickly and with high precision. Given the desire to provide more rapid and accurate laboratory results, there has been a recent movement to automate laboratory procedures and assays. Though taking repetitive tasks out of the hands of laboratory technicians and having them performed by a machine may provide ergonomic and throughput benefits, the task of automating intricate biological procedures has been fraught with difficulties. One source of these difficulties is the fact that biological materials are often complicated materials to work with. Contamination, accuracy, and completeness of an assay or sample processing procedure are ever-present concerns when the instrument is doing the work of a skilled laboratory technician. Nevertheless, automated instruments hold the potential to reduce human error and offer a more consistent and repeatable series of sample manipulations and assays.
Accordingly there exists a need in the art to minimize laboratory technician handling time of biological specimens prior to assay, while ensuring that sample processing is completed accurately without the risk of contamination. The present invention addresses these and other needs.
None of the references described or referred to herein are admitted to be prior art to the claimed invention.